Archiv für Februar 2010

I have an entry in my notbeook from a trip where I had the wish of beaming myself to my desired destiny. The whole entry started a very interesting discussion with my brother and friends and came back to mind just recently.

‚I‘m once again stuck in a travel bus. Sleep is impossible since the ground we drive on cannot be called a road [European measure] and the driver really seems to insist on the ‚EXPRESS‘ sign on the outside. While I‘m dozing I start thinking about how much time I spent for transportation on this 10-day trip (not inlcuded inner-city transport) and come to a total of about 30 hours. I‘m impressed although not shocked. Wouldn‘t it be nice to be able to beam myself instead of going through all this hustle?‘

The whole idea was mainly brought to audience by the TV show Star Trek with its most famous sentence ‚Beam me up Scotty.‘ but it could become reality one day as scientists already work on it for quite some time.
In all the discussions we found out that beaming is not just about crossing long distances without the dimension of time. There are far more positive and probably even more negative aspects that need to be questioned before anyone should really consider using this technology.

One of the many aspects we talked about were the components ’space‘ and ‚location‘. As we discussed it we figured that they lose their total meaning. It simply doesn‘t matter anymore where I am if I could beam myself to any place in about no time. In the meantime it puts a very high pressure on us. Because we can we also have to be basically ‚everywhere‘.

I think the most important question though was whether it effects my body or different if I can be ‚reduced‘ to a binary code what would be the effect when just a small portion is changed?! We found a possible solution to that but the consequences are immense. My personal binary code of the very moment needs to be registered and saved in a HUGE database to have something like a backup in case of an error. What this means though is that I‘m giving the information of myself to make reproduction possible.

From this point I could go on forever but to me or us it showed that transportation becomes a mere side-product or maybe also simply a justification for scientists to work on it.

Images are never ‚blurry‘.
What we define in photography as ‚blur‘ is the aberration of the object depicted. But as images are not made to be compared with reality they cannot be ‚blurred‘ or ‚imprecise‘ or ‚different‘ (different than what?).

I‘m more and more thinking about my upcoming thesis and started writing down any kind of thought that seems appropriate for my topic. In general the topic will be ‚travel‘ or ‚journey‘ which sound and are actually quite huge terms that don‘t really give me a point to start. Or I simply would need to choose a ’sub-topic‘ and start from there which of course seems easier to find than it is. I still have time to cut it down a little but then again I would like to do that soon.
So this morning I had a question in mind that is a little abstract but follows the idea of ‚Fischli/Weiß':

Another video clip that caused my computer to crash several times (also caused by power cuts in our flat) but that came out alright. I‘m still not extremely satisfied with the end result – the close-up of the highway jumps a little too fast (rendering it again only takes about 6 hours ) – but it’s already much much better than the first one.
Enjoy.